I wish the 4 canvases I wrote to you about had gone. If I
keep them here for much longer, I might paint them over again
and I think it's better if you get them just as they come, off
the heath. The reason I haven't sent them is that I don't want
to send them to you carriage forward at a time when you say
that you yourself might be short of cash, and I cannot afford
the carriage myself.

You'll remember that Gigoux's book tells how it came about
that 17 of Delacroix's pictures were turned down all at the
same time. That shows - to me at least - that he and others of
that period were faced with connoisseurs and non-connoisseurs
alike, who neither understood them nor wanted to buy anything
by them - but that they, who are rightly called “les
vaillants” [the brave] in the book, didn't talk of
fighting a losing battle but went on painting.

What I wanted to say again is that if we take that story
about Delacroix as our starting point, we still have a lot of
painting to do.

I find myself faced with the necessity of being that most
disagreeable of people, in other words of having to ask for
money. And since I don't think that sales will pick up in the
next few days, the situation seems rather dire. But I put it to
you, isn't it better for both of us, après tout, to work
hard, no matter what problems that may entail, than to sit
around philosophizing at a time like this?

I can't tell the future, Theo - but I do know the eternal
law that all things change. Think back 10 years, and things
were different, the circumstances, the mood of the people, in
short everything. And 10 years hence much is bound to have
changed again. But what one does remains - and one does
not easily regret having done it. The more active one is, the
better, and I would sooner have a failure than sit idle and do
nothing.

Whether or not Portier is the right man to do something with
my work - we need him now at any rate. And this is what I have
in mind. After, say, a year's work, we shall have put together
more than we have now, and I know for sure that my work will
fare better the more I can add to it. People who show some
liking for it now, who speak of it as he does, and show it from
time to time are useful, because if I work for, let's say,
another year and they are able to add a few more things to
their collection, that will speak for itself even if the
collectors themselves have nothing to say at all.

If you happen to see Portier, tell him that, far from giving
up, I intend sending him much more. You, too, must go on
showing my work if you meet people. It won't be all that long
before we have more important things to show.

You yourself will have seen - and it is something that
pleases me enormously - that 1-man shows, or shows by just a
few who belong together, are becoming increasingly popular. I'm
sure that in the art world this has more avenir [future] than
other ventures.

It's a good thing people are beginning to realize that a
Bouguereau does not do well next to a Jacque - or a figure by
Beyle or Lhermitte next to a Schelfhout or Koekkoek. Scatter
Raffaelli's drawings about and judge for yourself if it's still
possible to get a good idea of that singular artist. He -
Raffaelli - is different from Régamey, but I think he
has just as much personality.

If I kept my work with me, I am sure I should go on
repainting it. Sending it to you and Portier just as it comes
from the countryside or from the cottages, I may well include
an example that isn't any good - but some things will have been
saved that would not have been improved by frequent
repainting.

Now supposing you had these 4 canvases and a few smaller
studies of cottages, someone who saw nothing else of mine would
be bound to think that I painted nothing but cottages. And
likewise with the series of heads. But peasant life involves so
many different things, that when Millet speaks of
“travailler comme plusiers nègres”
[working like a bunch of slaves], this is truly what has to be
done if one wants to assemble a body of work.

One may laugh at Courbet's saying, “Peindre des anges!
Qui est-ce qui a vu des anges?” [Painting angels! Who has
ever seen angels?] But to that I should like to add, “des
justices au harem, qui est-ce qui a vu des justices au
harem?” [Justice in the harem, who has ever seen justice
in the harem?] And Benjamin Constant's painting, Des Combats de
Taureaux, “qui est-ce qui en a vu?” [Bullfights,
who has ever seen those?] And so many other Moorish and Spanish
things, cardinals, and then all those historical paintings they
keep on doing yards high and yards wide! What is the use of it
all and what are they doing it for? Within a few years most of
it looks dull and dreary and more and more boring. But still,
perhaps they are well painted, they could be that.

Nowadays, when connoisseurs stand in front of a painting
like the one by Benj. Constant, or like some reception given by
some cardinal by I don't know which Spaniard - it's the custom
to say, with a meaningful air, something about “clever
technique.” But as soon as those same connoisseurs are
confronted by a subject from peasant life or a drawing by, say,
Raffaelli, they criticize the technique with the same knowing
air - à la C. M.

You may think I'm wrong to comment on this, but I'm so
struck by the fact that all these exotic pictures were painted
in the studio. Just try going outside and painting
things on the spot! All sorts of things happen then. I had to
pick off a good hundred or more flies from the 4 canvases
you're about to receive, not to mention dust and sand, etc.,
not to mention the fact that if one carries them through heath
and hedgerows for a couple of hours, a branch or two is likely
to scratch them, etc. Not to mention the fact that when one
arrives on the heath, one feels tired and hot after a couple of
hours' walk in this weather. Not to mention the fact that the
figures don't stand still like professional models, and that
the effects one wants to capture change as the day wears
on.

I don't know how it is with you - but as far as I am
concerned, the more I work at it, the more absorbed I get in
peasant life. And the less I care for Cabanel-like things,
among which I would include Jacquet, and the present-day Benj.
Constant - or the highly praised but inexpressibly, hopelessly
dry technique of the Italians & Spaniards.
“Imagiers!” [Popular print makers!] I often think
of that term of Jacque's.

Yet I do have parti pris [prejudice], I respond to
Raffaelli, who paints something quite other than peasants - I
respond to Alfred Stevens, to Tissot, to mention something
completely different from peasants - I respond to a beautiful
portrait.

Zola, who otherwise, in my opinion, makes some colossal
blunders when he judges pictures, says something beautiful
about art in general in Mes haines: “Dans le tableau
(l'oeuvre d'art), je cherche, j'aime l'homme -
l'artiste.” [In the picture (the work of art), I look
for, I love the man - the artist.]

There you have it; I think that's absolutely true. I ask
you, what kind of man, what kind of visionary, or
thinker, observer, what kind of human character is there
behind certain canvases extolled for their technique - often
no kind at all, as you know. But a Raffaelli is
somebody, a Lhermitte is somebody, and with many
pictures by almost unknown people one has the feeling that they
were made with a will, with feeling, with
passion, with love.

The technique of a painting from peasant life or - in
Raffaelli's case - from the heart of urban workers, introduces
problems quite other than those of the smooth painting and
portrayal of actions of a Jacquet or Benjamin Constant. Namely,
living in cottages day in and day out, being out in the fields
just like the peasants - in the heat of the sun in summer,
enduring snow and frost in winter, not indoors but out in the
open, and not just while taking a walk but day in, day out,
like the peasants themselves.

And I ask you, all things considered, am I really so wrong
to object to the criticisms of those experts, who more than
ever before bandy this so often irrelevant word
“technique” about (giving it an increasingly
conventional relevance)? Considering all the traipsing and
trudging it takes to paint “the mourning peasant”
in his cottage, I dare say this work involves a longer, more
tiring journey than the one so many painters of exotic subjects
- whether “la justice au harem” or “reception
at a cardinal's” - have to go on to produce their
choicest eccentric subjects - since Arabic or Spanish or
Moorish models are readily available, against payment, in
Paris. But anyone who, like Raffaelli, paints the ragpickers of
Paris in their own quarter, has greater problems and his
work is more serious.

Nothing seems simpler than painting peasants or
ragpickers and other workers, but - there are no subjects in
painting as difficult as those everyday figures! As far as
I know, not a single academy exists in which one can learn to
draw and paint a digger, a sower, a woman hanging a pot over
the fire, or a seamstress. But every city of any importance has
an academy with a choice of models for historical, Arabic,
Louis XV - in a nutshell, every sort of figure, provided
they do not exist in reality.

When I send you and Serret a few studies of diggers or
peasant women weeding, gleaning corn, etc., as the first
of a whole series on all kinds of work in the fields, you or
Serret may discover flaws in them, which it will be helpful to
me to know about and which I shall in all probability
acknowledge.

But I should like to point out something perhaps worthy of
consideration. All academic figures are put together in the
same way, and, let us admit, “on ne peut mieux” [it
cannot be done better] - impeccably - faultlessly. You
will have gathered what I am driving at - they do not lead us
to any new discoveries.

Not so the figures of a Millet, a Lhermitte, a
Régamey, a Lhermitte [sic], a Daumier. They are also
well put together - but après tout, not the way the
academy teaches. I believe that no matter how academically
correct a figure may be, it is superfluous, though it were by
Ingres himself (with the exception of his Source, because that
surely was, is and always shall be, something new), once
it lacks that essential modern aspect, the intimate character,
the real action.

You may ask, when will the figure not be superfluous,
for all its faults, and grave faults to my way of thinking?
When the digger digs, when the peasant is a peasant and the
peasant woman is a peasant woman, is this anything new? Yes,
even the little figures by Ostade and Terborch don't work as
people do today.

I could say much more on the subject, and I should like to
say how much I myself want to improve what I have begun - and
how much more highly I value the work of some others than I do
my own. I ask you - do you know of a single digger, a single
sower, in the old Dutch school? Did they ever try to do
“a worker”? Did Velásquez look for one in
his water carrier or his types from the people? No.
Work, that's what the figures in the old pictures don't
do.

I've been plodding away the last few days at a woman whom I
saw pulling carrots in the snow last winter. Look - Millet has
done it, Lhermitte, and by and large the painters of peasants
from this century - say an Israëls - they consider it more
beautiful than anything else. But even in this century, how
relatively few among the legion of artists paint the
figure - yes, for the figure's sake avant tout
[above all], i.e. for the sake of form and modelé
[modelling], yet cannot imagine it otherwise than in
action, and want - what the old masters and even the old
Dutch masters who depicted so many conventional actions avoided
- want, as I say, to paint the action for the action's
sake. So that the painting or the drawing has to be a
figure drawing for the sake of the figure and of the
unutterably harmonious form of the human body - but at the same
time a pulling of carrots in the snow. Do I make myself
clear? I hope so, and you might mention it to Serret.

I can put it more succinctly - a nude by Cabanel, a lady by
Jacquet, and a peasant woman not by Bastien Lepage, but
by a Parisian who has learned his drawing at the
academy, will always convey the limbs and the structure of the
body in the same way - sometimes charming, accurate in
proportion and anatomical detail. But when Israëls, or,
say, Daumier or Lhermitte, draw a figure, one gets much more of
a sense of the shape of the body, and yet - and that's
the very reason I'm pleased to include Daumier - the
proportions will sometimes be almost arbitrary, the
anatomy and structure often anything but correct in the eyes
of the academicians. But it will live. And Delacroix
too, in particular.

It still isn't well put. Tell Serret that I should be in
despair if my figures were good, tell him that I don't
want them to be academically correct, tell him that what
I'm trying to say is that if one were to photograph a
digger, he would certainly not be digging then. Tell him
that I think Michelangelo's figures are splendid, although the
legs are unquestionably too long, the hips and buttocks too
broad. Tell him that, to my mind, Millet and Lhermitte are the
true artists, because they do not paint things as they are,
examined in a dry analytical manner, but as they, Millet,
Lhermitte, Michelangelo, feel them to be. Tell him that I long
most of all to learn how to produce those very inaccuracies,
those very aberrations, reworkings, transformations of reality,
as may turn it into, well - a lie if you like - but truer than
the literal truth.

And now it's nearly time to close - but I felt the need to
say once more that those who paint peasant life or the life of
the people, though they may not be counted among the
“hommes du monde” [men of the world], may well stay
the course better in the long run than the creators of exotic
harems and cardinal's receptions, painted in Paris.

I know that it is disagreeable of one to ask for money at
awkward moments - but my excuse is that painting what appear to
be the most commonplace things is sometimes the most difficult
and expensive. The expenses that I must incur if I want to
work are at times considerable when compared with my means.
I assure you that had my constitution not become virtually like
that of a peasant, through exposure to the elements, I should
not have been able to endure it, for there is simply nothing
left over for my personal comfort. But then I don't seek that
for myself either, any more than many peasants seek anything
other than to live as they do. But what I do ask for is paint,
and above all models.

From what I write about the figure drawings you will no
doubt have gathered that I am particularly keen on going ahead
with them. You wrote not long ago that Serret had spoken to you
“with conviction” about certain faults in the
structure of the figures in the Potato Eaters. But you will
have seen from my answer that I found fault on that score
myself as well, though I did point out that this was my
impression after I had seen the cottage many evenings in the
dim lamplight, after I had painted 40 heads, from which follows
that I set out from a different point of view.

However, now that we have started to discuss the figure, I
have a great deal to say. I find Raffaelli's perception of
“character,” that is, the words he uses to describe
it, good and well chosen and exemplified by the drawings. But
those who, like Raffaelli, move in artistic and literary
circles in Paris, have, après tout, different ideas
from, for instance, mine, out here in the country among the
peasants. My point is that they are looking for a single word
that will sum up all their ideas - he suggests the word
“character” for the figures of the future. I agree
with that, with what I think is the meaning - but I believe as
little in the accuracy of the word as in the accuracy of other
words - as little as in the accuracy or effectiveness of my own
expressions.

Rather than say, “there must be character in a
digger,” I would put it like this: the peasant must be a
peasant, the digger must dig, and then there will be something
essentially modern in them. But I feel that even these words
may give rise to misconceptions - even were I to add a whole
string of them.

Far from cutting down on the expenses for models - which is
a fairly heavy burden on me now as it is - I think spending a
little more is called for, very much called for. For what I am
aiming at is quite different from doing “a little
figure” drawing. To show the peasant figure in
action, that - I repeat - is what an essentially modern
figure painting really does, it is the very essence of modern
art, something neither the Greeks nor the Renaissance nor the
old Dutch school have done.

This is a question I ponder every day. The difference
between the great, or the lesser, masters of today (the great,
e.g. Millet, Lhermitte, Breton, Herkomer; the lesser, e.g.
Raffaelli and Régamey) and the old schools is, however,
something I have rarely seen expressed in articles about art.
just think about it and see if you don't agree. They started
doing peasants' and workmen's figures as a “genre”
- but nowadays, with Millet, the perennial master, in the lead,
these figures have become the very essence of modern art and so
they will remain.

People like Daumier - one must respect them, for they are
among the pioneers. The simple but modern nude - as
revived by Henner and Lefevre - ranks high. Baudry, and above
all such sculptors as Mercier and Dalou, are also amongst the
very soundest. But the fact is that peasants and ouvriers
[workers] are not nudes, nor does one need to imagine them in
the nude. The more that people begin to do workers' and
peasants' figures, the better I shall like it. And for myself,
I can think of nothing I like as much.

This is a long letter and I'm not even sure if I've made
myself entirely clear. Perhaps I'll write a few lines to Serret
too. If I do, I'll send the letter to you to read, for I do
want to make plain how much importance I attach to the figure
issue.

At this time, Vincent was 32 year old

Source:Vincent van Gogh. Letter to Theo van Gogh. Written July 1885 in Nuenen. Translated by Mrs. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, edited by Robert Harrison, number 418.URL: http://webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/15/418.htm.